Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 497

mini-AIR April issue: Geneva, butter, etc.

The March issue of mini-AIR (our monthly newsletter — it’s a wee little supplement to the magazine) just went out. You can read it online, too. Topics include:

The Bogus Butter Question
Details about upcoming shows in Geneva
The winner of last month’s Bass-Described Singing Fish Competition
Maltol from the putrid urine of rabbit
and more

It also has info about upcoming events.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just add yourself to the mini-AIR list, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month.

Phantosmia as and in a weather forecaster, reportedly

Phantosmia — smelly hallucinations — and the weather unite, at long last, as subjects of a science report:

“Phantosmia as a Meteorological Forecaster,” S. R. Aiello and A.R. Hirsch [pictured here], International Journal of Biometeorology, March 2013. the authors, at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, explain:

“In normosmics, olfactory ability has been found to vary with ambient humidity, barometric pressure, and season. While hallucinated sensations of phantom pain associated with changes in weather have been described, a linkage to chemosensory hallucinations has heretofore not been reported. A 64-year-old white male with Parkinson’s disease presents with 5 years of phantosmia of a smoky burnt wood which changed to onion-gas and then to a noxious skunk-onion excrement odor. Absent upon waking it increases over the day and persists for hours. When severe, there appears a phantom taste with the same qualities as the odor. It is exacerbated by factors that manipulate intranasal pressure, such as coughing. When eating or sniffing, the actual flavors replace the phantosmia. Since onset, he noted the intensity and frequency of the phantosmia forecasted the weather. Two to 3 h before a storm, the phantosmia intensifies from a level 0 to a 7–10, which persists through the entire thunderstorm. Twenty years prior, he reported the ability to forecast the weather, based on pain in a torn meniscus, which vanished after surgical repair…. This is the first reported case of weather-induced exacerbation of phantosmia.”

Co-author Alan Hirsch is The Man in the field of predictions about effects of specific smells on human thinking and behavior.

(Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.)

LINK < >

Abusing robots – current positions [part 2 of 4]

Continuing the discussion regarding the abuse of robots we turn now to a recent lift research workshop conducted in Geneva, Switzerland, entitled – ‘Harming and Protecting Robots : Robotic Dinosaur Abuse’.

Kate Darling (who is a ‘research  specialist’ at MIT’s Media Lab) and Hannes Gassert (who is a ‘technology activist’ ) presented the workshop in which 4 groups were invited to ‘kill’ a selection of Pleo® robots. An axe and other implements were provided. Here is a short explanatory video.

Unfortunately, the video doesn’t go into much detail regarding the outcome of the experiments. But Kate Darling informs via this website that :

“After 1.5h of interaction, none of the 4 groups could kill their Pleo. Nor were they willing to kill another group’s Pleo to save their own. Once threatened that all of the Pleos would be destroyed unless someone stepped up, Ralf was finally axed. Silence.“

(Thanks to Julia Lunetta for alerting us to Darling’s research)

COMING SOON : The ‘ethics’ of robot torture

Ig Nobel Prize winner Chris Frith lecturing at Harvard this week

The long-named Harvard Mind/Brain/Body Interfaculty Initiative announces:

MBB 2013 Distinguished Lecture Series
Uta Frith and Chris Frith (University College London)

Wednesday, April 24th, 5:15 p.m., Science Center Hall D

Chris Frith - How the Brain Creates Culture

Thursday, April 25th, 5 p.m., Science Center Hall D

BACKGROUND: Chris Frith, together with colleagues Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner and Richard Frackowiak, were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens. [That research was published in the report "Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, April 11, 2000, pp. 4398-403.]

BONUS: To become a London taxi driver, one must have The Knowledge. It is said that The Blue Book is a valuable aid in attaining The Knowledge. [The NBC News Photo Blog recently looked at would-be London taxi drivers striving to attain The Knowledge.

BONUS: The application to become a London taxi driver

A manga-maker for Dr. Nakamats?

Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr. Nakamats writes, on his blog:

I’m looking for the most innovative Manga cartoonist in the world to make my own life story by manga.

This is from The Committee of Sir Making Dr. NakaMats Manga.

On April 18, 2013, Dr. NakaMats announced to make his own Manga, cartoon, about his 80 years of journey of .

Many people in the world today know about his inventions but not much about his hidden stories and the values. There are many episodes thru the experience during the world war II, lectures based upon physics, chemistry, and medical science. This manga will be very unique and so innovative. And, we are looking for innovative cartoonist / manga-ka in the world who can devote him/herself to create a new manga.

Dr. Nakamats was awarded the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition, “for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting)”.

BONUS: A small portion of the major film The Invention of Dr. Nakamats:

A blood-y good documentary from the 1950s

Hemo the Magnificent is a documentary about the human blood circulatory system. Directed by for the Bell Telephone System (for the public good, and for good garnering goodwill), it stars comic actor Sterling Holloway, cartoon voice performers Mel Blanc and June Foray, and two more somber-seeming hosts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

(HT Bella Seaberg)

BONUS: By the same production team, a year or so earlier: Our Mr. Sun:

Abusing robots – current positions [part 1 of 4]

“The shocks are becoming too much.”

“Please, please stop.”

“My circuits cannot handle the voltage.”

“I refuse to go on with the experiment.”

“That was too painful, the shocks are hurting me.”

The dialogue above may remind readers of Stanley Milgram’s disturbing (and now-classic) psychology experiments on authority and obedience (1963). But there’s a difference. The clue is in the word ‘circuits’. For this 2008 experiment was not performed with a human subject in the hot seat – but with an apparently intelligent robot (made of LEGO® – see pic).

Researchers at the UseLab of the Technical University of Eindhoven, Dr. Christoph Bartneck and Dr. Jun Hu , instructed the participants in the experiment – entitled : Exploring the abuse of robots  (Interaction Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, 2008) to administer ‘electric  shocks’ to the robot – up to a staggering level of 450 volts. But unlike Milgram’s study, in which 35% of participants refused to administer the fatal voltage, this time none of them turned down the order to give the robot the full (and presumably lethal) shock treatment. There are implications, say the researchers :

“…the results show that people have fewer concerns about abusing robots than about abusing other people.”

but add :

“ …it appears difficult to make valid conclusions about the relationship between the destructive behaviour and the animacy of the robot.”

The paper can be read in full here :

Notes:

● The second part of the experiment involved participants smashing a robot with a hammer in order to ‘kill’ it.

● The robot abused in the study bears a remarkable similarity to the one identified in two very similar earlier (2005) experiments, also conducted at UseLab but this time by Chioke Rosalia, Rutger Menges, Inèz Deckers, and Christoph Bartneck. See: ‘Cruelty towards robots’ and : ‘Robot Abuse – A Limitation of the Media Equation’  But, oddly perhaps, neither appear to be cited in the newer Bartneck/Hu study.

● All of the participants laughed or giggled during the ‘lethal’ shocking episodes : “Their spontaneous laughter suggests that the setup of the experiment was believable.” say the researchers.

COMING SOON : More robot torture

The Eat-This-Then-Your-Sweat-Will-Smell-Like-Rose-Water Experiment

The Gugurecus web site reports on what may be a biomedical experiment, though perhaps it is simply a product. Auto-translated from Japanese into English, they say:

“Fragrant body, rose water,” this has become a powder, the fragrance of the rose diverges from the sweat glands to drink by dissolving in water, sweet fragrance seems begin drifting from the whole body. The monitor survey of Kracie, beginning fragrance drifts to 30 minutes after drinking this water rose, and that lasted for three hours. 3 bags powder can make rose water 500ml equivalent of 250 yen (262 yen including tax).

Personal: Boston, after the Boston Marathon bombing

I rarely write personal things in this blog, or in the magazine, or in the newspaper column (in The Guardian). The Guardian asked me to write something about what people in Boston are thinking in the immediate wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the ensuing horrors. (The Guardian asked me to do this, I think, because I am their only columnist who lives in the Boston area — I live in Cambridge.)

Here are those thoughts, and also (below them) some context material that did not make it into the newspaper. I have written a slightly different headline here that the one that appears in the newspaper.

* * *

The Boston Marathon now becomes, for us, a symbol of who we are

Now we go about our business. We’ll find out, in bits, which of the details actually happened, and which were confused rumours. We’ll also begin to find out, we hope, how we are connected to the people who did this. They were part of the community, went to school with people we know, lived near people we know, shopped at the stores we shop at, probably walked past us on the street dozens of times.

There is one thing that, for sure, has changed. Now the Boston Marathon really is important. It’s become our symbol, to ourselves, of what and who we are, of how we react to the unexpected, of how we work together or not. Right now the overwhelming feeling is: damn, we do pull together when it really matters.

What about the marathon will change? By that I really mean what about us, the community, will change? How will precaution balance against the desire that we must not allow terrible things to happen? Make the marathon high-security, and part of what’s always made us would be gone. Will we let this terrible week break that? These are things we will argue about. Because we are Bostonians, and because we know that two people did not want us to continue being what we are.

Cambridge and Boston are the same place, and so is Watertown. A winding river and kink-tangled roads separate Cambridge from Boston, and divide one part of Watertown from another, but the divisions are for argument’s sake. We have many little neighbourhoods. We argue about how different the neighbourhoods are (hell, there’s a word, “Cambridgey”, meaning “will argue and complain all-too-knowingly till the end of time about any specific thing”). But we have been reminded that when push comes to shove, or to much worse, we are one place. And we are we, not a bunch of them-over-theres.

The bombing, the murder of the MIT policeman, the carjacking, the gun and grenade battle, the evacuation of The Street Where the Suspects Lived, the capture of Suspect Two, all of this happened within a three-mile half-circle around the street where I live. Texting, email, Twitter and Facebook kept us sewed together with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues. The news was, of course, confused, and three-quarters wrong as the frantic bits dribbled in.

On Thursday night, Twitter brought word of a “shooter” being on the loose at MIT, two miles from my home. We heard sirens. That night and the next day, life was happening on Twitter and email and text messages, and in the sounds from outside. Lots of sirens. Messages to friends in the parts of town where according to the Twitter snippets – dire, evil things were or maybe were happening. Relief, usually instant, when the friends messaged back. Friends in Watertown emailed us photographs of the heavily armed policemen outside their windows.

Friday was simultaneously ordinary and surreal. A strong request, not an order, from the governor to stay indoors, with an explanation of why we should. And we all did. The whole day the streets were empty. No people. Almost no cars. All day. Through the window came only birdsong, interrupted now and again by bursts of multiple sirens. Very un-Boston.

* * *

Here is the extra material that did not make it into the Guardian:

* * *

Some background, about the marathon and Boston:

The Boston marathon, for most of us, was never important (except to the runners), certainly not in a life and death way. But it has always mattered. Boston is about one tenth the size (any way you want to measure it) of New York City. Boston was, early on, the country’s most important and dominant city. We still laughingly and laughably feel (if not think) that New York is our great rival. The marathon — the BOSTON marathon, is Boston’s only event that, year after year after decade after decade, got noticed by the rest of the world. It’s the eccentric family member who persistently (since 1897!) kept at its odd little obsessive activity, never harmed anyone and, late in adulthood, became a minor quasi-celebrity who inspired the creation, around the world, of flashier, richer rivals.

We have little experience with bombs going off in our city. Here’s what feels different about our situation, as compared with that of other places, places that have had to deal with this more often.

One of the few things that felt clear about this bombing: It happened right at the spot where the attention — the city’s, the area’s, the world’s attention — would be and was intensely focused.

It happened at the finish line of our one, our only long-lived, hey-world-this-is-us civic minor pride and joy.

It happened at a time when there would be and were — predictably, reliably — normal, American, Massachusettsian, Bostonian everybodies who brought themselves there BECAUSE they all wanted to to be there together. On marathon day everyone, native or immigrant or foreign student or visitor-for-a-day, feels and is treated as a Bostonian.

Whatever the bombers thought they were attacking, that’s what it felt — to me, anyway — that they were attacking. They attacked us. They attacked our us-ness.

Ig Nobel winner Chopra issues quantum complaint about TED talks

Deepak Chopra — winner of the 1998 Ig Nobel physics prize ”for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness” — wrote an open letter complaining about the TED Talks. Dr. Chopra complains that the TED talks “practice semi-censorship” on people who are as tremendously inventive as Dr. Chopra is. [One of Dr. Chopra's many inventive books is pictured here, at right.]

Chris Anderson, organizer of the TED Talks, wrote an open letter of reply, under the headline “TED, Censorship, Consciousness, Militant Atheists, and Pseudo Science!”

Several Ig Nobel Prize winners have been invited to give TED Talks and TEDx talks. Those talks were generally highly publicized. Click on the links here to see talks by Kees Moeliker (shown here, below), Dan Ariely, Phil Zimbardo, Bart Knols, and Magnus Wahlberg.

Dr. Chopra himself has not given a TED Talk, but was once part of a discussion that happened at a spur TED event.

BONUS: I (the organizer of the Ig Nobel Prizes) myself will be giving a talk at TEDx CERN, on May 3 of this year.

Here is Kees Moeliker’s recent TED talk: